While there has long been support in Openfire for early versions of XMPP over WebSocket (per Dele's fine original plugin, and also via OfMeet), the final specification (RFC 7395) had not yet been implemented ... until now! We have just released a new Openfire plugin that is compliant with the latest specs, extending the core BOSH component with a WebSocket upgrade capability where supported. Older browsers that do not support WebSocket may continue to use BOSH (HTTP long polling) as a fallback connection protocol.

The new Openfire WebSocket plugin has been tested using the Stanza.io library and is ready for immediate use. It is available for download via the Openfire plugins page or directly via the "Available Plugins" page within your local admin console. Feel free to leave feedback here in the comments or post questions to the Ignite Realtime Community site.

I've just released Smack 4.1.3 to Maven Central. This is a bugfix release which can act as drop-in replacement for any Smack 4.1 version. Users are encouraged to update since Smack 4.1.2 introduced a memory leak in the Roster API which was fixed in 4.1.3.

This is a minor thing. But i wanted to share with the community, that after a few days of back and forth with reviewers i've managed to get my article about Spark submitted (with some remarks) to Wikipedia. Openfire had its page for a few years already (i'm not the original author, but i update it occasionally). So i thought it is not fare for Spark not to be represented as well Also, i have found a few articles in other languages, which were either outdated or very short (linked them to this article), so i thought Spark needed a better source of information.

2534 days after its last release, we are happy to announce the 2.0.0 release of the Whack API!

Whack is our Open Source XMPP (Jabber) component library for XMPP components. External components are processes that run outside of the Openfire's process but can connect to the server to add new functionality. Whack is an implementation of XEP-0114: Jabber Component Protocol.

This release brings a number of small improvements and bugfixes. Notably, Whack 2.0.0 is now based on the Tinder API.

Starting with the current release, Whack shall also be available through Apache Maven. The artifact coordinates of the core module are: org.igniterealtime.whack:core:2.0.0. The source code includes a number of small examples on how to use the library, which should have you up and running in no time!

The Ignite Realtime community has released Spark 2.7.1 for general availability and it can be downloaded from Ignite Realtime: Downloads (Note: there are no working Mac OS X installer as our current build environment has no working setup for Mac, also Spark has lots of issues on the current Mac OS versions and the community has no active Mac OS developers willing to step in).

This release contains much less changes comparing to the previous version (12 tickets with a minor changes and fixes). The plan is to do minor releases with a few changes, so it would be easier to find a culprit if regression happens. But there won't be a new version every other day. We don't want system admins to get mad at us

This is the complete list of changes in this version (official changelog):

SPARK-1607 - Show JID as contact name if instead an empty string would have been shown

SPARK-1609 - Default resource should be "Spark" without a version number

SPARK-1611 - Update Lithuanian translation

SPARK-1617 - Fix loading of Spellchecker's IgnoreUppercase setting

SPARK-979 - Add an option to disable graying out and italic for idle contacts

SPARK-1503 - Option to use hostname as a resource

SPARK-1584 - Update bundled JRE with the latest version

This release is bundled with the latest and last Java 7 update (7u80). Next releases will be bundled with Java 8 (most probably). Printing GUI has been replaced with the modern Java based version.

There is still no Project Lead developer for Spark (no active developers at all actually). So there won't be a regular schedule of releases. But you can always share your patches on the GitHub. If you find new issues, you can report them in the forums and we will at least file them in the bug tracker for the future developers to tackle.

The interaction with talented developers and with enthusiasts from around the world makes working with Openfire and Spark very enjoyable. IgniteRealtime.org opens exciting new ways for this vibrant community to share ideas and work together.